


Cosmic Octopi

by zenstrike



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action/Adventure, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Implied Body Horror, POV Alternating, Shiro (Voltron) is So Done, bookish Keith because yOU CAN PRY THAT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-26 01:11:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14989493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Team Voltron descends into the belly of a beast and are Very Unhappy About It.or, that time a cosmic space creature fell in love with Lance.





	Cosmic Octopi

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to write this like an episode but idk if that worked. Let’s say season 1-ish.
> 
> I stop short of actually describing it, but there are definitely body horror implications so: read with care.
> 
> Obvious inspiration comes from too much Lovecraft and the superb Caitlin Kiernan.

    “This feels like a trap,” Hunk said. “Like. More than usual.”

    There was a squawked curse and Shiro guessed Hunk had bumped a little too hard into Pidge. He set his jaw and glanced at the assuring glow of his armour.

    “I’m not getting trap-vibes, exactly,” Keith muttered near Shiro’s shoulder.

    “Do not,” Shiro warned through his teeth.

    “I can’t help it.”

    Too many books, Shiro thought for what was probably the first time ever.

    They were a bundle of comforting lights in the darkness of the cave. Or, tunnel system.

    “Definitely a tunnel system,” Keith said, like he could hear Shiro’s thoughts, or like he was remembering the long night they had read a little too much Lovecraft together.

    (“ _Isn’t this kind of, I don’t know—dull?”_

_Keith had given him a look of grim disgust, bundled up in his favourite sweater and all the blankets they had. “No,” he had said, and then launched into an imaginative interpretation of the previously dry_ At the Mountains of Madness _.)_

Shiro stopped that memory, fast.

    “For what?” Lance asked, his voice the steadiest yet. Shiro loved him a little, in that moment.

    A squawk, a minor scuffle.

    “Stop grabbing me!”

    “Stop wandering!”

    “Keith. Lance.” Shiro was tired already. “Let’s just focus on getting out of here.”

    “Yeah,” Hunk agreed. “Before Galra come leaking out of the walls or something.”

    “Gross,” Pidge said with feeling.

    Shiro agreed.

    He stopped, and both Hunk and Keith walked into him.

    Lance snickered.

    “ _Shut up_.”

    “Don’t start again,” Pidge sighed. “Shiro will yell and attract the scary monsters.”

    “ _What,_ ” Hunk gasped.

    “ _Monsters_ ,” Keith echoed and Shiro reached back to pinch him but missed, just barely.

    “You stepped on my foot,” Lance grumbled.

    “Oh.” Keith paused. “Sorry.”

    Shiro was a little proud.

    “We need a plan,” he announced and squinted into the darkness.

    “Because we’re lost.”

    “Yes, Pidge. Because we’re lost.” Shiro sighed. “Lance, try the comms again.”

    “...nothing.”

    Just to be sure, Shiro tried his and got alarming static instead of Coran and Allura.

    “We’ve got to have missed the beacon by now,” Pidge muttered.

    “Like we’d have seen it.” There was a little buzz of light in the corner of Shiro’s eye as Lance waved an arm for emphasis. “Look at this.”

    “It’s ink-black,” Keith added. Before Shiro could stop him: “Squid ink.”

    “What?” Lance balked.

    “He’s read too many books,” Shiro said. He took a deep breath, then turned fully around. The slightly illuminated faces of his ridiculous band of defenders looked up at him, with varying degrees of expectation.

    “How many books is too many books?” Lance muttered.

    Keith made the vocal equivalent of a shrug.

    Roll call, Shiro thought. One yellow Paladin, quaking in his boots but doing better than Shiro would have hoped. One green Paladin, unimpressed and intrigued all at once—bored, maybe, but secretly terrified? Shiro wasn’t sure. One blue Paladin, perhaps the most collected of them all. Lance flashed Shiro a smile. And—one red Paladin, who needed to get out more.

    Well. This was probably “out.”

    “Okay, we have a couple of options. We turn back and try and retrace our steps. Or—we keep going.” Shiro squinted at Keith, then raised a single, vaguely threatening finger: “Stop thinking about monsters.”

    “We’re in space,” Lance said with a shrug. “We’ve all got aliens and monsters on the mind.”

    “Keith always has aliens and monsters on the mind,” Pidge chirped.

    “I _do not_.”

    At least they were still light-hearted.

    The distress call they had received suggested a crew in need of assistance, maybe a little defending. When they landed planetside in swirling desert and low-hanging, vibrant clouds, the ground had been pocked with holes that reminded Shiro too strongly of gophers. Or rabbits.

    So they went in one.

    Shiro was going to take a long nap when they got back. There wasn’t even anything _in_ the holes (the tunnels) as far as they could tell: the lights of their armour did little to penetrate the inky darkness, and even the proper flashlights in their helmets seemed to just—disappear, maybe a foot in front of them.

    If it wasn’t for the others, he wouldn’t know if his eyes were open or closed. Hunk’s nervous whispering and the occasional touch from Pidge and Keith were encouraging, steadying. A little reminder that they weren’t drowning in black, not yet.

    “I think it’s getting smaller,” Lance said, his expression twisting. He shifted on his feet looking up and away and then back at Shiro. Like he had been wondering about saying it. Something small dropped in Shiro’s stomach. Lance shrugged. “I mean, maybe.”

    Shiro swallowed. He and Hunk reached up at the same time, their hands brushing the top of the tunnel too soon.

    “Oh no.”

    Pidge.

    Her shoulders hunched. She was scowling, looking up and then down, and then right at Shiro. “Let’s go back.”

    Shiro nodded.

    “Alright team,” he said, summoning his confidence. “Let’s go, and let’s take it slow.” He slipped between Keith and Hunk to lead the way back.

    He thought he felt Pidge’s warm presence at the small of his back, like she was afraid of straying from his footsteps.

    “It’ll be fine,” Lance was saying and Shiro was grateful for his boisterous voice.

    “Lance is probably just imagining it,” Keith added.

    “Rude.”

    “I didn’t imagine that,” Hunk muttered, and they fell silent again.

    Shiro counted their breaths. He counted his own blinks.

    Something wasn’t right.

    “Shiro,” Keith said. “Do you smell—“

    He did.

    Brine. Smoke. Earthy and spicy all at once. It was heavy and his next, sucked-in breath settled like film on his tongue and the back of his throat.

    He reached back and it was Pidge’s hand he caught.

    “I think we’re in trouble,” Pidge said, soft and small.

    “What _is_ that?” Keith coughed.

    “Guys,” Lance said, and finally there was something confused and unsteady in his voice. Fear stuttered in Shiro’s chest. “Do you hear that? It sounds like—“

    “Where’s Hunk?” Shiro heard himself say. He squeezed Pidge’s hand. “Stay close—“

    “ _Lance_!”

    Keith’s voice was too loud, too angry in the quiet, cramped darkness. Shiro whipped around, in time to see the slow retreat of the light from Lance’s armour, his arms outstretched. Shiro could hear, as though frozen, the small puff of a surprised gasp.

    Keith caught Lance’s arm, swearing.

    Keith, Shiro thought. Pidge yelled something.

    They were gone, blinked out.

    The ground dropped from under him.

* * *

 

    Hunk was thinking about his mother, his sisters, his nieces. He was thinking about pasta and cream sauce, about grilled shrimp, and roasted peanuts in a savory sauce.

    He could feel the slime on his hands still, and could smell the spiced-citrus smell of it coating his armour and his hair.

    So he thought about his mother.

    ( _“I’m proud of you,” she had said on their last video call. Hunk thought she’d be proud of what he was doing now, too._ )

    Maybe not at this exact moment.

    He spit and felt the slime burn his throat, mouth, and lips.

    “Ugh,” he groaned into the darkness.

    He couldn’t see anything. He was pretty sure he was standing, and that he was moving—forward. It was all relative anyways.

    He was thinking about something cool and long wrapped around his throat, the smell overpowering his senses and driving away his voice.

    _Sturdy as a rock_ , something that sounded like him said. _Steady as a—_

    “Nope,” he said out loud. “Nope. No way.”

    His bayard flashed into life in his hands, heavy and sure and bright.

    “Lance?” he yelled into the darkness, grinning with the awareness that _hell yeah, his eyes did work._  “Guys? Anyone?”

    _Steady as a mountain._

    Slime slid down his cheek. He spat again.

    _Bitter and chewy._

    “Bitter?” he echoed.

    There was a weight around his ankles again. Panic, and a touch of fury, gripped him and with a shout Hunk opened fire, rocking with the kickback of his bayard.

    Finally, light. Intermittent, but light all the same—the laser fire from his bayard was apparently doing _something_ and proving _too much_. In flashes like a nightmare, Hunk saw his shots bursting down the length of the tunnel before disappearing into more darkness, and lining the walls were more dark shapes than he could see. Blinking, gaping, purple eyes—and gasping, sucking mouths.

    “Monsters,” he gasped, and started running.

 

* * *

 

 

     _Well, isn’t this interesting,_  crowed Lance’s voice in the cracks of Keith’s mind. _You aren’t supposed to be here._

    “What the fuck,” Keith tried to gasp out, but swallowed darkness instead.

    Great, he thought.

 

* * *

 

    She landed on Shiro and tasted sand. Sand, Pidge thought. She rolled off and gasped at the sudden, shooting pain in her elbows.

    It wasn’t dark, it was white.

    “Shiro?”

    He groaned but she felt him touch her shoulder. Pidge realized she was sitting up.

    Slowly, her vision cleared.

    The largest of the planet’s three moons was glowing above them, casting a warm light over everything that had seemed so foreboding in the early part of the day. Pidge blinked rapidly and scrubbed at her eyes.

    “What—“ Shiro broke off next to her, his voice catching.

    Pidge looked at him. “We’re outside,” she said, thoughtful. Panic flashed through her then and she stumbled to her feet. “Where are the others?”

    Shiro stood with a grunt. “Let’s find them,” he said.

    From somewhere far behind Pidge, she heard the lions roar.

    She was running before Shiro could suggest it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

    When Lance opened his eyes, he was in Blue’s cockpit and staring into blackness on the viewscreens. He tilted his head.

    “Huh,” he said.

    He was calm. His hands sat steady on his knees, which didn’t bounce, and when he traced his tongue over his teeth he didn’t feel the familiar spark of anxiety, that occasional discomfort in his own body. He hummed, just to hear himself, and then laughed just to hear that too.

    “I guess I’m dead,” Lance said cheerfully. He leaned forward to rub adoringly at Blue’s console. “Are you really here?”

    She wasn’t. He got nothing back, not a hum or a purr or a lionesque reprimand. He sighed and leaned back again.

    “I’m probably not dead,” he mused and felt the words roll of his tongue with a surreal awareness. “I think I’d be somewhere else if I was dead. At least somewhere on Earth, no offense Blue. You’ll always be my main girl.” He paused. He crossed his arms. “I’d like to go home.”

    Nothing happened.

    And then, a spark of something horrible in his gut, in his back—

    _Fluid_ , said his own voice as it travelled up his spine. _Like water_.

    “Well, yeah,” Lance gasped out. “I _am_ —“

    Something split along his—

 

* * *

 

     It wasn’t his own voice screaming in his head anymore, but something looser and primal and, frankly, gross.

    “Shut up!” Hunk yelled and ignored the burning in his lungs. He was still running, still heaving breaths. There was a smoky smell on the air but he was trying to outrun it.

    The screaming continued. He didn’t hear it, he felt it.

    He couldn’t fight something he couldn’t see. He couldn’t fight something _he was inside of._  And he remembered being inside of it: choking and fighting and squirming and then.

    Well. It spit him out. It was kind of offensive.

    He slipped.

    Hunk let out a squawk and flailed his arms. He smelled smoke, briney horrible smoke—and the slime. He stumbled back against the too-close side of the tunnel, his back bowing. The wall seemed to heave against him, fluid and solid all at once.

    Like jello.

    He giggled.

    “Well,” he said to himself. “This sucks. Majorly.”

    He took several deep breaths and closed his eyes, opened them again.

    And there was light opposite.

    Hunk launched across the tunnel, his hands smacking into the slime of the other side. Yes, lights, the familiar v-shaped crescent of their armour and Keith’s eyes staring right back at him.

 

* * *

 

    Keith imagined a fish tank and gaping faces looking back at him. When fish opened their mouths, could they scream? Would he have heard it? In his head he was yelling.

    _You have to let go now,_ said Lance’s voice while Hunk yelled something through the muck and the ooze and opacity of it all. _I don’t want you_.

    Like hell, Keith thought and tightened his grip on Lance’s wrist. He could see Hunk clawing at whatever was holding him. Keith was cold and Lance, still near, was silent.

    No sign of Shiro. No sign of Pidge. No sound in his ears but that non-Lance’s laughter. He was pretty sure it was mocking him, but he wasn’t sure for what.

    “Hunk,” he tried to say, but his jaw was slow to move and his voice stuck in his throat.

    He just had to try.

    His bayard flashed into his free hand, bright like the tail of a cartoon comic, and when the blade extended, white-hot and vicious, he heard the non-Lance’s laughter shift into screaming.

 

* * *

 

    Blue was yelling. Her head back, mouth open, yelling. Pidge could feel it in her bones and the closer they got the more she wanted to cover her ears. Red and Green seemed cowed, their heads bent. Pidge could feel something like a snarl from Green, uncomfortable and disoriented.

    “Lance,” Shiro gasped out, sliding to a stop. A cloud of yellow dust floated around him and settled, slow in the uncertain gravity of the planet.

    Pidge’s heart stuttered in her chest.

    “We have to find them,” Shiro was saying, and she was so suddenly grateful that he was here and he was steady and he was sure.

    But his hand shook as he stepped towards Blue and set a hand against one of her enormous legs. Her roaring stuttered to a stop.

    “We have to go back in there,” Pidge said, automatically looking towards one of the pocked holes in the surface of the planet. Ridiculously black, like a void in all the colour.

    She didn’t want to go back. She wanted Lance and Keith and Hunk to emerge from one, swearing and joking and jostling each other. Nothing ever went the way they wanted, though.

    “I’ll go back,” Shiro said, still looking up at Blue. “You stay with the lions.”

    Some of her fear gave way to fury. “ _What_?”

    “Now is not a great time for an argument.”

    Pidge opened her mouth to snap back, but then Shiro was dashing away from Blue and Blue was lowering her head, opening her jaw, pointed right at the ground.

    “Oh no,” Pidge said at the same time Green roared.

    “Oh no,” Shiro agreed already reaching for her. Pidge clung to him and they ignited their jetpacks just as Blue’s mouth erupted with light and danger.

  

* * *

  

    There were memories in Lance that weren’t his own. All he could feel was the seeping of something oozing and dark blue into newly formed fissures of his body, and all he could see were squirming, gelatinous shapes.

    _Whatever you want,_  his voice said like a thought. _I’ll give it to you._

    Whatever he wanted?

    He saw it—saw her—gliding through space, a tangle of stretching limbs and blinking eyes. He remembered his step-mother peeling aloe vera and he remembered holding it in his hands and Marco marvelling at how alien this thing seemed, something that grew on and from the Earth. He thought about jellyfish on sand, rumpled and tangled like discarded plastic.

    Oh, Lance thought. The universe had gone all Empire Strikes Back on them.

    His own voice laughed in his ears. _Not quite_ , it promised and he could feel its delight at understanding the thought. It was leeching his own memories just as it was giving him its.

    _Give me this,_ it said with a soft smoothness to his voice that Lance had never managed. _And I’ll give you—anything._

    The memory came back, of his step-mother and Marco and his mother laughing in the kitchen. Blue water and raindrops.

    Was he really that wistful?

    _Yes,_ the voice replied with equal parts delight and understanding.

    He saw her descend through a clouded atmosphere, all blues and purples and brightness—three moons and one sun, intermittently filling the sky. So much colour, she thought. And she made it her home, spreading against the surface and making it her skin.

    He saw the fallen ship, the crew held in her veins sucked dry. He saw, even, Hunk, bursting out of her—all wrong, a bad fit.

    _I was waiting for you_.

    Lance didn’t want to be eaten.

    _Not like that_ , it said. _Someone like you_ —

    Someone like him, sucked into another tangled creature, had made—her.

    Oh boy, Lance thought. Oh freaking boy.

    “No thanks,” he tried to say, but he didn’t have a mouth anymore.

    But he had a hand—or an arm, or a little of each—because he felt heat.

  

 

* * *

 

    Keith’s blade tore through the wall and the screaming in Hunk’s ears abruptly stopped—and then Keith stopped. His eyes seemed to be bulging out of his head. Hunk thought: he’s drowning.

    “Hang on,” he gasped out, his lungs burning and his eyes tearing up as the smell grew, and grew, and grew. “I’m coming, guys, just hang on.”

    He slipped his fingers into the slit Keith’s blade had made and he ripped into the fleshy wall.

    The screaming started again, but it lasted only a half-second and then Hunk was drowning it out with his own yelling.

 

* * *

 

 

    _I don’t want you,_  snapped Lance’s voice in his ears.

    Keith wanted it to _just shut up_.

    _Let go, let go, let go_ , and it became a chant that sounded less and less like Lance with every moment.

    But he was warming, slowly, and there was relief flooding through him, and then Hunk was reaching into the tank and pulling him by his shoulders and out.

    The three of them fell in a slimy, stinking pile. Keith choked up slime onto Hunk’s chest and watched the light of his armour shining through.

    “Everything about this is so bad,” Hunk said, and that’s when Keith knew he could hear again.

    So he laughed.

    “Dude,” Hunk sighed with affection.

    Keith rolled—slipped—off him. His bayard vanished in a flash, and then he finally looked at Lance.

    “What happened?” Hunk asked, sitting up.

    “I don’t know,” Keith replied, and coughed up some more muck. He was still holding Lance’s wrist and something hysterical in him was telling him not to let go.

    They peered over Lance. Hunk was holding his breath.

    “Lance?” Keith tried, squeezing his wrist. “Lance, come on. We’re getting out of here.”

    Lance groaned. Keith sagged with relief.

    “I got him,” Hunk said and pried, finally, Keith’s hand from Lance’s wrist.

    “She wants a baby,” Lance moaned as Hunk hoisted him up and over his shoulder. He dangled like a rag doll, making soft unhappy noises. “A baby, guys.”

    “Okay,” Keith said instead of anything useful. He patted Lance’s back awkwardly. “We’re getting out of here, buddy.”

    Lance groaned.

    “You lead the way,” Hunk said and Keith, on trembling legs, did.

 

* * *

 

 

    The ground rolled underneath them as they skidded into an uncomfortable landing, more yellow dust and sand rising around them. Pidge could feel the heat from Blue but she couldn’t move with Shiro wrapped around her.

    “Shiro—“ she tried, but her voice was drowned out by the lions, by the rolling ground—like a waterbed, she thought with some distance. Like fluid, squirming—something.

    And Shiro didn’t let go, so she didn’t either. 

* * *

 

    _Lance_ , said his own voice. _Lance, come back_.

    “No thanks,” he muttered out loud. “I’m good.”

    “You’re really not,” said Keith’s voice from very far away.

    “I’m too young to be a parent,” Lance sighed.

    “Okay, Lance,” said Hunk’s voice.

    And they were in his ears, not his head, and that was the most relieving thing that had happened to Lance in _ages_.

    They were bickering, kind of. Hunk didn’t bicker, not really. He yelled sometimes, but rarely _at_ someone. Keith yelled, but he wasn’t yelling now. He was thinking, using his aggressive thinking voice and it was really freaking annoying that Lance knew what that meant.

    And he remembered, because _she_ remembered, that Keith had somehow saved his life.

    “Keith,” he tried to say, but his tongue felt heavy. “Keith, dude—thanks.”

    Garbled gibberish came out, but he was pretty sure he heard Keith say: “You’re welcome.”

    “ _What_ ,” said Hunk. “in the freaking hell happened?”

    “No clue,” Keith said, and Lance garbled his agreement.

    There was something gentle at the back of his mind, like a call home. Like his mother’s hugs. Like the laughter in the lounge when they were five people instead of five paladins.

    Blue.

    “It’s Blue,” he tried to say but just sighed instead.

    He didn’t see it, but the tunnel erupted into blue, hot light in front of them. He didn’t hear it, but Keith and Hunk screamed. 

* * *

 

    Allura and Coran were yelling in his ears as the comms came back to life and Blue was throwing her head back with a triumphant shout that the others lions echoed.

    “Guys!” Pidge was shouting, pulling herself free of Shiro.

    And he watched, helplessly relieved, as Keith scrambled over the edge and pulled Hunk and a flopping Lance up after.

    All three were covered in white slime, and they stunk, and they were shaking, but they were alive.

    Shiro didn’t collapse, but he hugged Keith and that was enough.

 

* * *

 

    Lance sagged at the table, half-asleep and still mumbling semi-coherently. Coran had decided not to toss him in a pod, promising that he was physically “quite well” but mentally “a little jumbled.”

    Keith had his head on the table and contributed to Hunk’s account with the occasional grunt.

    “She didn’t like the way you tasted,” Lance mumbled, his head back and his eyes closed.

    “She called me _bitter_ ,” Hunk grumbled.

    “The C’than are legendary,” Coran said, beaming at them all. “Sentient creatures that roam the universe looking for the planet to call their home! Incredible stuff.”

    “ _It_ put us in jello,” Keith snapped without lifting his head. “ _It_ tried to eat Lance _and_ Hunk.”

    “You gave her heartburn,” Pidge said from her place on top of the table, cross-legged and surveying the other three with a grin.

    “Ugh,” Keith said.

    “And the crew?” Allura asked, finally.

    Keith lifted his head and looked across the table at Lance. Lance had opened his eyes and was staring up at the ceiling, his mouth twisted into a frown.

    Steady Lance, Shiro thought. Lance who wasn’t afraid of the dark, or who wasn’t willing to say he was afraid.

    “The downed ship? The distress call?” Allura prompted when no-one said anything.

    “Gone,” Lance said.

    Quiet again.

    “You’ll forget,” Coran said. “Don’t worry.”

    Lance closed his eyes again. Keith’s head dropped back to the table.

    “I need a nap,” Shiro said.


End file.
